Sandy Searcy

Owning Your Life



The saying goes something like “life is what happens while you were making other plans”. One of those walks, talks and quacks like a duck cliches whose truth you can’t deny. Life doesn’t tolerate back seat drivers, and that is what most of us our. If you aren’t going to get into the driver’s seat then I guess you shouldn’t be surprised at where you end up. Bad analogy? Not really. You have only so much control when you are driving. You are governed by traffic laws, weather and road construction. Life throws up its own versions of roadblocks and it has its own set of rules, one of them being mortality. There is an endpoint to every journey and life is no different.

A common theme among the widowed is a sense of the surreal when assessing their lives. Places that once seemed as familiar as your own face suddenly are as unrecognizable as the face that stares back at you from the mirror each day.  The strong desire to let yourself drift along fights a daily battle with the sense that where you are heading is not someplace you would have ever chosen to be. It reminds me of that Talking Heads song,

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack

And you may find yourself in another part of the world

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful

Wife

And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here? 

It’s easier to let things happen to you than to take charge and change your life or in the case of being widowed, salvage it and start over. I have seen many a person just give up and bend over. And why not? It’s effortless Being a victim of circumstances may suck but it doesn’t require any planning or major expenditures of anything other than the willingness to prostrate yourself before every ill that comes your way. And I suspect (actually I know) that those of us who do not fire up the GPS and look for a new route have probably always ridden at the back of the bus. How does the chorus go?

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

One of the founders of the WET widow group back in Iowa, Sandy Searcy, suggested that I start a widows group when I was settled in up here. Rob has even brought the idea of my doing that up from time to time, but like my working with At-Risk students, I would eventually find it too difficult to be supportive in that benign Oprah-ish way. Eventually I would start kicking asses and I won’t add “in a loving and supportive manner” because I doubt that it would be perceived in that manner. Some people are too much the author of there post-disaster lives for me to muster sympathy enough to mask my total frustration with them. While I can completely empathize with the need to sort things our, I can’t understand letting your life go down the shitter while you are assessing and reorganizing.

There is another song by a group called Switchfoot that I began listening to after Will died. It talked about how the past is over. There is no “do over” and in the now you have to take stock and ask yourself the hard question.

this is your life, are you who you want to be

this is your life, are you who you want to be

this is your life, is it everything

you dreamed that it would be

when the world was younger and you had everything to lose

I am not always the decisive, move ahead person I portray myself to be. I have moments when I am stuck and exasperating as my husband can attest to, but even when I don’t have the answers and the GPS is down, I have a sense of the need to know, to think, to reevaluate and to move. Even if the move is lateral, as long as its not back, it’s all good.

W.E.T. – Widows in Transition


I joined a group of widows the other night. I have moved from the relative comfort of online anonymity to the discomfort of open face to face forum. My naturally shy nature cringes away from any type of large group setting. It is only rarely that I fit in. Even in a group such as this one, which is primarily for younger widows, where the odds of fitting in are at about 99%, I still manage to feel like an outsider.

I came to W.E.T. (widows in transition) via the Young Widows Board, which was founded by 911 widows. I responded to an appeal for Iowans by a woman named CJ and was quickly invited to the monthly gathering of W.E.T.

I have to admit to being excited about it. I have never had the opportunity to be “normal” during this entire journey. In a room full of widows, surely I would feel a kinship and at home. Not really. Not that everyone wasn’t nice. They were wonderful and inviting. The group’s founder, Sandy, was genuinely happy to see new members and greeted both CJ and I warmly. Others, who were already there or as they arrived, made more than an effort to engage us.

CJ turned out to be one of those naturally extroverted people who can make talk, small and large. She easily worked the room. A kitchen with an island overflowing with food and crammed to standing room with widows.

I am not so gifted. It was one of the things I loved about being married. Someone to shadow without seeming to. I could hang by my husband’s side and not worry that anyone thought I was being stand-offish when in reality I was just painfully uncomfortable being in a situation where I knew no one and hadn’t the opportunity to assess the “danger” beforehand.

I don’t believe in shyness really. What people call shy, I just call self-preserving. I am easily overwhelmed and overly sensitive to my environment. When I have the time to size things and people up, I usually find a way to turn down the volume on my inner alert system and interact. When I don’t, I retreat. I am much better one on one and perhaps that is why I do so much better on the boards.

Even though the numbers are larger in reality, you can only deal with one person at a time. The thing that struck me about this group, aside from their welcoming ways, was the fact that many of the women seemed to enjoy telling their stories in much the same way that a group of new mothers gleefully recount their L&D stories. And maybe that is just the way of it. War stories are inevitable in like company.

I find it hard to tell my story anymore. I give the short version. I skim off the top. I downplay or simply don’t play at all. There was a time when I would recount the whole thing chapter and verse but now I would rather not. I am so consumed by where I am and what I want and trying to build the bridge between here and there that telling my story almost seems a burden that holds me back.

I had a husband. He died. We sat in a circle and introduced ourselves and our husbands. I cried through mine. It is harder to hold up the shields when I know I don’t have to and also, there was some relief being somewhere that I don’t have to.

I barely listened to the others though. At least not enough to recall much. It was too much. Pain. And I recoiled from a lot of it. It terrified me to think that women months and years ahead of me could still be in so much pain, and not want to move past it.

One woman was three years out, remarried and still not happy. How could that be? If you never learned to live again, what was the point?

I took my daughter to a children’s group today. Founded by the same woman, it gives children and their moms an opportunity to grieve safely among their own kind. My daughter is young. All her memories of her father are primarily images and ideas that I planted in her mind. She is a few years away from really comparing her life with that of other children and realizing what she has lost.

But, I could see it in the faces of the older ones, and in the faces of the moms. Do I look like that? I don’t want to. I want to be… I don’t know. I can’t not be a widow.

The other day the substitute for the man I normally work with inquired whether I was a Mrs. and I hesitated before saying, “Not anymore.” Normally I would have told him that I my husband was dead. I don’t use the word widow as a self-reference. But I did neither. Because I don’t know who I am.  So, once again I don’t truly fit in. Story of my life.